Text Editors

William Jerdan (1782 – 1869), Scottish editor of the Literary Gazette for 34 years.
Because I needed a picture of an editor.

There must be a zillion different text editors out there and most of them are crap, meaning they can't hold a candle to AEDIT, the glorious text editor I spent years with and that can run rings around any of these new-fangled jerk-wads. Yes, AEDIT could only deal with 80 columns, but that was all you could get on any screen back in 1980. It was abandoned by Intel sometime between then and now. I have a copy of the source lying around here somewhere, and I was going to do something with it someday, but I got distracted, and round toits are in short supply.
     Today I am using a Chromebook and I have a couple of really feeble editors loaded: Text and Caret. Neither one can do a proper search and/or replace. Text doesn't even offer replace. Caret's search and replace function only works on regular characters, it can't find line-feeds or tabs which makes it absolutely useless, absolutely useless I tell you.
    So I'm looking around and I'm not finding much, mostly a bunch of articles about the 'top 5 moronic editors for Chrome!' and the ilk, but I do find one cool thing: a bit of html code that will turn an empty tab on your browser into a text editor. It will look like nothing happened, but click on the empty page and you get a cursor. Start typing.
     You can bookmark this empty tab with the bit of secret sauce in the address bar and it will be there any time you need it. Admittedly, it is not a full featured editor, like my beloved AEDIT, but it's only one friggin' line of code.
    Beware: don't embed this special bit of code in some text that's going on the web, it is liable to make your whole page unreadable or something worse.